Giando Sigurani's Online Empire

Sometimes I get a bug in my bonnet about a project. In this case, I was enthralled with Adafruit's Super Game Pi system back when I was first getting into Raspberry Pi prototyping. I grew up on old games, and there are a fair few which I never got around to playing. I wanted a portable system, and the Super Game PI looked just to my liking. But Adafruit's system left a lot to be desired, like the fact that it's about as portable as an attaché case but without the handle or the dignity.

Hello fine folks! For the last few weeks, I have been putting my big hairy mitts in front of a webcam and doing boring things with them like soldering electronics and carving wood.

(Apparently there was a bad echo and my chat wanted me to know it)

That's because I've been doing a live stream where I build another of my Write-O-Trons to sell to the masses. 

Well, I'm almost done with the stream! I usually stream on Thursdays at 6PM Pacific Time, but I missed two weeks due to engagements with school. I will be missing this week as well due to an engagement involving top hats and wine. No I won't! I'm doing a stream today EVEN THOUGH IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!

But there will be only two more! So join me on March 10th at 6PM Pacific Time for the penultimate stream! http://twitch.tv/giandroid

The polite thing to do (and the common thing, in fact), would be to explain my absence from the Internet.

That is an expected behavior that infrequent bloggers such as myself.

To vanish without a trace with no explanation and then come back months later, palms to the air, and say, "Come on guys, life happened."

A paltry excuse is offered; infrequent blog posts resume, only to stop again a few months later. Life, in short, continues.

I will not do that.

Instead I will say that there is this thing called Read an Ebook Week on Smashwords, and Mister Mercury is part of it.

From March 2-8, Mister Mercury is free on Smashwords. You can purchase it (for nothing) here. All you have to do is enter the coupon code "RW100" at checkout and it is yours!

Of course, I could mention that Mister Mercury is always free consididering that I myself have released a special piracy editon for the exact purpose of allowing people to read it for nothing, because I would rather have them read it and not pay than to not read it at all.

But I will not do that. 

That would be silly.

There's a promotion going on after all.

My friend Matt Chapman (@Wadatahmydamie) does a lot of nice things for me that I don't often enough repay. He frequently offers helpful critiques and promotes my work on Twitter far more actively than I do, because he is actually active on twitter and I'm not. He and I are currently working on a particular conspiracy, the machinations of which I will not mention, or else it will not be much of a conspiracy.

Months ago he mentioned that he'd like to start working on writing projects larger than 140 characters, and I offered that if he came up with something good, I would post it on my website. Well, he did come up with something good, and I sat on it for months and months because I do that sometimes.

So here it is: A formal declaration in the war on Christmas. I don't personally have many feelings at all about Christmas, as to me it hasn't ever been more than an excuse to celebrate, in the coldest, darkest parts of the year, a highly repeated misconception. But it as an excuse that brings families together and puts more alcohol in veins than usual, so I can't feel that resentful about it.

I do hate Christmas music though. I'm waiting for the day that I can walk into a grocery store or some other public place during the holiday season and hear them playing death metal instead. I don't particularly like death metal; I'd just like to hear it during Christmastime, if only just once.

But to each their own. There is eggnogg during the holidays, and eggnog is delicious. There can't be much wrong in a scenrario that involves eggnogg, can there be?

Apparently, yes.

Apologies. I was working on a post, but then I got caught up with all this non-post fiction writing, you see. I had a seven-page post about my publishing situation in the works, but I put it on hold since the process of crafting it made me so very, very misreable. So I turned to my beloved fiction instead, which of course I can't put here. A flimsy excuse, I know, but it will have to do. I ran out of ideas for one of the novels I was working on, but, luckily, I had two backup novels in the works, and found out that I had a flood of ideas for each of them. Is working on three books at the same time something that only hacks do? I don't know.

In the mean time, here is a link to the trailer for that one movie I'm in, where I play a homeless person, a crazy person, a bar patron, and guy-who-hangs-around-in-backrounds-a-bunch-and-has-bad-hair.

The trailer's pretty entertaining, at least.

Things I Did While Waiting For My 2006 Dell Computer to Scan a 160 GB Hard Drive and Copy its Recovered Contents to a Flash Drive:

-Slept for 12 Hours
-Finished the last 5 chapters of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
-Wrote 10 pages of an upcoming short story/novella/novel/whatever
-Watched 2001: A Space Odyssey
-Watched 2 parts of a Richard Feynman lecture about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
-Screamed in anguish for 20 straight minutes
-Achieved Enlightenment
-Did my laundry

It has been an emotional few weeks, which is unfortunate, because emotions are for chumps and I don't have time to be affected by them with all the writing that still- some way, some how- has to be done.

Here is the absolute largest thing: My novel, Mister Mercury, has been unpublished from Eat Your Serial. I've left the company on amicable terms with my distribution rights safely secured, and will still be involved with them from day to day, including being their official ebook consultant, and publishing short stories with them from time to time. They've been excellent about giving me back my distribution rights, and have even pulled the story from their website, taken it down from Amazon, and have generally been very receptive to my questions and needs. I can take Mister Mercury and do whatever I like with it now.

Far be it from me to make the mistake of thinking that my dark little corner of the internet is being monitored regularly by, well, anyone at all, but in case I happen to be wrong about such things (stranger things have happened), here's what's been going on with the world of Giando.